No one again will ever organize and deliver the news in such a personal, sweeping way for so many millions of people than the way the CBS News anchorman did from 1962 to 1981.

Cronkite understood this long before he died in July 2009 at the age of 92. Television news has fragmented into so many pieces that no one person will gather the influence and popularity that Cronkite once commanded.

Cronkite wasn't just in the right place at the right time. In Douglas Brinkley's new biography, “Cronkite,” the newsman was a self-made original. Just as William Shakespeare's brilliance at the dawn of English theater won't ever be matched, neither will Cronkite's in inventing and defining the role of a network television news anchor.

Brinkley, a Rice University history professor who also owns an Austin residence, took up the biographical project some years ago at the suggestion of the late history-and-analytical writer David Halberstam.

The strength and beauty of Brinkley's book is that readers will be able to live Cronkite's life over the span of nearly 700 pages. As turbulent and interesting as the 1950s to the 1980s was, Cronkite's life was even more fascinating. Beyond knowing how to deliver news, he excelled at living. No one taught him.

Cronkite had his human flaws. He was an “air hog” who kept other talent off CBS broadcasts. He made judgmental mistakes at CBS's news desk, although rarely. His personality collided brusquely with others, including the legendary radio newsman Ed Murrow and Cronkite's successor at CBS, Dan Rather.

But Cronkite's courage, wit, intelligence, professionalism and foresight were second to no one. He possessed an eerie ability to prepare for news even before it happened.

Cronkite may have been born in St. Joseph, Mo., and spent part of his childhood in Kansas City, but it was his high school years in Houston and his experience at the Daily Texan at the University of Texas at Austin that put him on the path to his career.

More Information

Cronkite

By Douglas Brinkley﻿

Harper, $34.99﻿

He didn't graduate from UT-Austin. He withdrew to start a series of radio and newswire jobs that pointed him toward the chance to cover the European air war during World War II for the United Press, where he first made a big mark.

From there, Brinkley — no kin to Cronkite contemporary, news anchor David Brinkley — writes with spellbinding vividness about the rise of Cronkite's career through events and causes such as political conventions, elections, the John F. Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, the space race, Vietnam, Watergate, the environmental protection era and women's rights, to name just a few.

Brinkley unfolds the best version yet of how wire reporters literally fought each other to send the first alerts of the JFK assassination, and how Cronkite, in New York, was able to air the first bulletin to the nation.

Brinkley's great achievement is the consistent ability to frame Cronkite in three dimensions throughout the book. One example: Brinkley puts readers into the mind of Cronkite's mother, Helen. She must have been astonished to see her son, who flunked physics at UT-Austin, teaching the nation the latest space technology during the 1960s.

Brinkley exhibits the right feel for the issues of the news industry and for Cronkite's personality. His biography is based directly on numerous interviews and UT-Austin's archives. Only rarely does Brinkley cite Cronkite's 1996 autobiography, “A Reporter's Life.”

In short, Brinkley's absorbing biography is a story to treasure, an entrancing narrative of the immense growth of an ambitious young man into a news brand that shaped a critical part of his nation's history.